


Game

by nimmieamee (orphan_account)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Dementia, Flash Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-18
Updated: 2014-09-18
Packaged: 2018-02-17 20:25:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2322122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/nimmieamee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve is onscreen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Game

**Author's Note:**

> Another very very quick fic for the tumblr fic prompts meme. Tumblr user volkswagonblues gave me the first line. The rest is me, though, frankly, I'm not sure how I feel about it. Peggy's dementia doesn't really look like dementia towards the end here, but I'm tagging it anyway for the people who would like the warning.

Peggy stood there, and for a moment she was the denizen of a city where violence was neither accused nor pardoned, but accepted as part of the ritual of life. But she’d been in similar straits for much of her life, even if she no longer really knew it. So she sat back down, leaned into her pillows, and said, “Steve,  _Steve_ , for heaven’s sake. You should know by now not to do these things in the open.”

He really should know.

Peggy’s nurses were staring in horror at the screen – breaking news, very similar to the breaking news out of New York not so long ago, and Boston before that, and so on.

Terrorists. Vigilantes. No information on what was happening. Nothing to tell the public.

“They just don’t want to tell,” she told Nurse Dominique. “They say it’s because they can’t. But once it’s this bad, it’s CYA all the way down.”

She stared at the people screaming, running, the distant smoke, the shot of the injured leaving the bus. She couldn’t remember, exactly. Was it a video game? Peggy had last encountered video games when she’d bought a Sega Dreamcast for Gabe’s niece, years and years ago, and mostly she’d had her assistant buy it, and even then only because it was the first thing on the list. She was too old for video games.

But sitting there, feeling very superior, she was quite sure she would have been excellent at video games. The dirty fighting, the explosions, the running around aimlessly looking for information…

“Why does anyone do this?” she said, watching the people on the screen (they could make them look so realistic now, her grandson said). “It’s so stressful. It’s just like work.”

Then she caught sight of Steve. And for one wonderful, powerful moment, she let herself believe that this was real.

Or at least that it had meaning. The burning cities had always been real. But after a while they had become so commonplace…

It couldn’t be Steve. Steve had gone down in the ice. Someone had decided to resurrect his memory, that was all.

Peggy stared at it unflinchingly, and calculated, without even knowing she was doing it, what she would do, if she were this not-Steve. What she would do if she were the people fighting him. What Gini Richmond would do – now there had been an agent. And Sirko. And Howard. And that younger one, Nick, the field agent. What Drummonds would do. What Pierce would do. So many plans of attack for so many violent cities.

She lost the information all the time. But sometimes it came back.

Onscreen the mask came off.

She leaned away from the pillows and said, annoyed, “Oh, for heaven’s sake. For heaven’s sake. Don’t stop, Barnes. It’s not him. It can’t be him.”

She never wondered what Steve would do, because Steve was a never-to-be, a person of the past. And the past was never a violent city. It was a bittersweet moment in photograph, a young man lost.

What would happen, she wondered idly, if it collided with this future of commonplace violence? Who would win?

"How simplistic," she said, as the announcer described a victory for the public, said the Captain was being taken away for his own protection. "How simplistic. No one wins. Least of all the public. We’ll all lose — we always do — and then the fighting becomes even more routine. But—" and this with a significant glance at Nurse Dominique, still standing there, transfixed, "—we do it so that things can better in the long run."

Fight. Destroy. Spy. Explode. Dismantle. 

Take the loss to make things better. That was the motto. Planes downed in the ice. The past gone. 

Steve was being led away onscreen.

"Oh for heaven’s sake," Peggy said, leaning back into the pillows. "For heaven’s sake. He’s taking a hit now. But we’ll come out ahead because of it."

That was Steve.


End file.
